Is Poor Code Quality Affecting Your Bottom Line?

Is your organization spending too much time performing system maintenance? Are your developers spending half their day documenting systems and analyzing bugs? Unscrupulous code negatively impacts an organizations in several ways, especially as it continues to expand globally and implement applications within a complex, multi-tier environment. The motivation to enhance software quality stems from two main factors: a desire to improve risk management and a specific need to reduce IT costs.

An application may be bug free and technically correct; however, certain symptoms serve as a hint toward larger problems. These symptoms indicate design weaknesses with the potential for slowed performance or increased risk of failure:

Duplicated Code

Overly Large Methods or Procedures

Excessive Parameters

Too Many Class Implementation Dependencies

Contrived Complexity

Excessively Short or Long Identifiers

Implementation of design standards, proper analysis, and the use of code quality metrics make it possible to detect less obvious problems up front for better implementation results in a complex infrastructure.

What Attributes Boost Code Quality?

Software errors ranging from badly designed interfaces to extensive, unnecessary lines of code frequently result in game changing results. If your organization does not have a handle on code quality, then associated costs and risk will prove to be difficult to manage. The following application attributes are the most desirable because they offer business value:

Reliability

Efficiency

Security

Maintainability

The reliability of an application determines the risk of failure during implementation. Is the application capable of performing efficiently at run time? What is the likelihood of security breaches or compliance violations directly resulting from the source code? If your organization does not properly monitor software quality, the chances of critical system failures, unknown security breaches, and compliance flaws are much higher.

Code Quality Analysis Improves Implementation Results

Poor or inefficient source code can decrease time to market value and cause system wide critical errors. The ability to quickly alleviate complexity or risk directly associated with source code results in a more robust, cost effective application. Code quality control provides specific benefits including:

Faster Time to Market

Improved Application Health

Decreased Technical Debt

Elimination of Hidden Risks

Regained Control of Legacy Systems

Extended Useful Life of System Components

Early problem identification provides the opportunity to boost performance, reliability, and productivity within an infrastructure. Improved code quality also allows an organization to decrease technical debt and associated risks.

Code quality analysis provides several benefits when maintaining or implementing applications within a complex infrastructure. CAST offers a solution for analyzing code quality and regaining control. If unscrupulous code is taking away from organization performance or increasing costs, it is time to consider further analysis to identify these problems long before they cause extensive infrastructure damage.